Say… Oh, Ariel does not want to be on the live. I haven’t done one of my Samantha Leith’s manifesto ones for a wee while. So I thought I would do that today. What I wanted to talk about today was becoming a constant learner. Now, many people are under the total misconception that you go to school and you learn stuff and you leave school, and you get on with your life, and that’s it. Do you know that if that’s what you do, if that’s your attitude, you will actually stop growing when you leave school, like that’s it, all over red rover. You’re not going to expand your life, your mind in anything, in any way, shape or form. Learning is… There’s many things like, learning is a gift you give yourself. I love that one. But for me, learning, it’s a habit, and I talk a lot about habits, you know that, but it’s something you have to build into your life every single day.
And it’s important when you’re doing it, if you have a job or a business, for example, for compliance points of view, means you need to do certain levels of reeducation every year, that’s one thing. I hold that in kind of a different category, because that’s something you need to do to maintain what you do. That’s not what I’m talking about, what I mean when I say be a constant learner. I’m talking about finding things that interest you or inspire you or a topic that you might have randomly read something in the news or heard about something, going, that seems interesting. I want to know more about that. They’re the things I want you to be wanting to constantly learn.
Now, as you know, you can look around my office at the many, plethora of books. I’m an avid, avid reader, so I read for at least half an hour, every day, try to do a book a week. It doesn’t always happen. I read nonfiction, good old fashioned nonfiction in paperback or hardback, if it comes in. I read fiction because I’ve recently gotten back into reading fiction. I went through a phase, I don’t want to read about murder and all those things because I like crime fiction, it’s all too depressing, but no, it’s fun, I like that. I read those on my Kindle because I can’t justify paying the money for a book that I’m only going to read once. Whereas, most of the books in here, like One Minute Millionaire, for example, I probably read this four times. In fact, I should probably read it again. It’s a great read.
Most of these, I will read definitely more than once. Some of them multiple times, and I’ll mark them and make notes and sticky things in them and all sorts of things, but it’s not just about reading. I listen to podcasts a lot. Recently, probably about six months ago, I came across a podcast I hadn’t heard before, fell in love with it straight away. I think I’m now up to episode 200. I’ve just been every time I’m walking the dog or in the car, I’ll be listening to the podcast. I also listen to audio books. I know Amazon has this funky thing called Whispersync where you can listen to an audio book and read it on Kindle, and they kind of catch up with each other. As I said, I use my Kindle for fiction, so I don’t do that, but apparently that’s really cool, so maybe I’ll give it whirl one day.
What else do I mean by constantly learning? Even reading blog posts of people you find interesting on topics you find interesting. It’s really, edumacational, that’s a word you know, edumacational. Okay, it’s not, I made it up, but educational, and empower all those things I love. Another thing you can do is take courses. I remember years ago doing a French cooking course with some family and some friends. And the first night, we all turned out to the course and my brother pulled out a bottle of wine because we’re cooking French food, let’s drink wine. And everyone was like, “Oh, can you bring wine?” We didn’t get in trouble. So the next week, everybody came along with wine, and that was fantastic. There’s a couple of dishes I learned in that course, which would have had to have been 16 to 18 years ago now that I still make. That was 400 bucks, whatever it was at the time, really well spent.
Another thing I do is, I buy courses, I invest in education in that way. Marie Forleo’s B-school’s an example of that, Denise Duffield-Thomas’s money course is one of those. There’s so many things you can do online these days to invest in your education and constant learning. Masterclass does some fantastic ones. I’ve been really keen to do some of their stuff, [inaudible 00:04:53], but I will get there. It is something I definitely want to do. Maybe I’ll do the Serena Williams’ one about tennis, see if I can learn how to play. Okay, maybe I won’t do that one because I don’t think I can play tennis, but they have some fascinating ones. Even when you’re on the interwebs and you’re cruising around the interweb and you see this or that or this or that, and someone might offer you a free download, and yes, it will be to join their mailing list, their email list, but some of those can be invaluable.
There’s a saying on the internet, the best and most successful people on the internet give away their best stuff. They will give you the keys to the kingdom in the stuff they do on their blogs, in their podcast, in their free downloads, all of that kind of stuff. Make the most of it, but don’t become a learning junkie because that can just be… If you’re doing that constant learning to the extreme where you’re just consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, consuming, that’s passive action in your life, and you don’t want to get into that habit because you just keep going around a treadmill, and nine times out of 10, you actually start suffering from shiny mirror ball syndrome. It’s like, I see a disco light. I’m going off there to learn something. And you don’t want to do that either.
So be strategic about what you’re spending your time learning. Next year, for example, one of the things I’ll be learning in 2020 is French again. Now I haven’t studied French since I was in high school. And Gregson Vincent was my French teacher and I’m Facebook friends with him, so hi, Greg, if you’re watching, but Elodie is studying French again next year, and she’s doing it through distance learning through her school, so I’m going to do it with her. I’m really excited by that. And who knows, maybe I’ll remember things, maybe it will all be completely blank, and I won’t remember anything I did at school, which is probably more likely, but I’m excited by that.
So be a constant learner, but be strategic about what you want to learn and be choosy about where you get the information and what you’re learning from. Don’t just learn to saturate yourself with stuff because our brains get… They don’t technically get full, but we can feel like our brains get full and really overwhelmed when we are trying to learn too much. That’s my happy Monday to you guys today. Don’t forget to be constant learner. Go over to samanthaleigh.com and sign up for your weekly dose of Sparkle and you’ll get more juicy stuff in your email inbox every week, and I’ll see you tomorrow. Bye. Muah.